Chapter 13

The animal was a beast.

Mikhail carried the wild pig on his shoulders, bound by its feet with a rope that wrapped around his right hand so tightly that it rubbed his skin raw. The boar wiggled and squirmed like one might when they were about to die. Understandable.

Mikhail's back already panged from the quickened pace. He needed to arrive at the Golden Room at true noon, the same time he always entered the Remnant Nation's most important site. Consistency created trust with the Grief Bearers. The Great Master would appear at the same time if he decided to grace them with his presence. The Grief Bearers collected each day to see if he might show. Mikhail never showed his face, his presence cloaked in dark wool.

Mikhail shifted the pig's weight to distribute it across his broad shoulders, and the pig squealed right in his left ear. If those squeals could have been words, they would have been, STOP! Put me down! But there was no stopping what Alexandra had put into motion.

Mikhail walked the abandoned tunnel underneath the Remnant Nation. A tunnel system none in the Nation knew about. A tunnel that allowed Mikhail to sneak in and out of the Nation's path, past the prisons of Hell and into the trapdoor within the Golden Room of Grief. Above ground, the infamous Orphans lined the walls of the fortress exactly as trained, ready to shoot without warning. Without question. Without explanation.

The Orphans he collected.

The Orphans he trained.

He stopped to shift the weight again and to tighten the rope before continuing down the tunnel. Mikhail needed the wild pig alive as a sacrificial offering. He'd offer it to the Grief Bearers who would then offer it as a sacrifice to the Flare. It didn't matter what sense it made. Rituals didn't make a lick of sense to him.

The Remnant Nation had spent its entire existence preparing for battle, and now that the long-awaited time was here, it needed to be marked with a sacrificial feast. Ancient armies of old had sacrificed animals before a battle, smearing their blood on the altars of their worship, on their walls, on their faces. Mikhail would show the Remnant Nation how to do the same. And then he would march them all to war, where many of them would die a death far less dignified than the pig's. What a vicious cycle. A truly tired cycle. Men feasted on the dead flesh of animals only to become the dead flesh on which the animals later feasted.

War didn't make sense. It didn't need to. All Mikhail needed to do was to overtake New Petersburg. End the Evolution once and for all. He couldn't worry about the amount of death that lay ahead: animals, men, half-Cranks, and Orphans.

"Almost there," he said to the pig, and the wild animal quieted down. With every step closer, Mikhail felt a sensation of finality. In an infinite world with infinite possibilities, few things felt final. Even fewer things felt final to Mikhail since coming back from The Gone. A miracle. A curse. How could something be both things?

His life was his own but at the same time it was never his own. He saw everything in contradictions. His brain worked differently than Alexandra's, whose mind only allowed her to see what she wanted to see. Mikhail is erratic, he can't be trusted. It never offended him because he knew her brain and her intuition battled each other. Mikhail wasn't erratic. He wasn't an unpredictable mess without any direction or consistency. He was quite direct and consistent with his plans for the Remnant Nation. His plans were to eradicate the people of Alaska.

She, the Goddess, obsessed with correcting him on his mis-use of vocabulary, was at the fault of her own assumptions. Her ego made her intuition less powerful, and her ego was the exact reason the Evolution would never work.

She only heard what she wanted to hear. She only saw what she wanted to see. And she didn't know what she didn't know. It was Alexandra's war within her own mind that made it possible for Mikhail to sneak away so often to the Remnant Nation. To build an army of Orphans solely for the purpose of defeating her and wiping the Flare from the Earth for good.

As Mikhail walked closer to the connecting tunnel to Hell, he smelled fresh blood and all the scents of stress. Sweat. Urine. Tears. Hell had all the worst smells. The wild pig on his shoulders wiggled and squealed. SQUUUEEEE . . . SQUUUEEEE . . .

Mikhail shouldn't have brought the pig with him alive. He'd have had an easier time carrying the beast and sneaking past the tunnels of Hell without the added noise. But then again, who would hear him other than the Orphans banished to Hell for punishment? And they'd be close to death.

A creaky tunnel gate opened in the distance. Or closed? In all his trips, in all his passages through the tunnels, Mikhail never heard sounds from Hell other than the moans and groans of children trapped inside the dark, dank prison, wishing they were dead.

He heard—and felt—the pounding vibration of footsteps behind him. Quick, small, footsteps. But the wild pig shrouded on his shoulders prevented him from turning his head. Before he could turn his body, before he could even wonder who was behind him, he felt the screaming stab of a knife in his lower back. Three inches to the right of his spine. A pain so great he could only collapse to his knees.

He dropped the pig from his shoulders with a thud, and grabbed at his right kidney. One of the first lessons of defense for the Orphans, learned at a young age, was how to render a man useless and dead within minutes by stabbing him in the kidney. Mikhail knew, because he was the one to teach the Grief Bearers, who taught the Orphan soldiers. The pig squealed and flailed its hog-tied legs. Mikhail rocked on his knees and breathed in deeply for three seconds, held his breath for three seconds, and exhaled for three seconds. Then he watched as a young boy, barely a soldier, used his knife to cut the hog's ties loose. Mikhail's prized pig and the wild Orphan ran off, together through the tunnel, not looking back.

Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out.

Three seconds each.